Wolfgang Haber

Wolfgang Haber was born on 13 September 1925 in Datteln, in Westphalia, in what is now the district of Recklinghausen. In 1943 he was drafted for military service in the Second World War and sent to Italy. He was held as a prisoner of war in Italy and France and returned home in 1948.

He then studied botany, zoology, chemistry and geography at the University of Münster, LMU Munich, the University of Basel and the University of Hohenheim. In 1957 he received his doctorate in Münster with a dissertation on the bacteria and respiration of different natural soils in Central Europe.

From 1957 to 1962 Haber was a research assistant to the ecologist Heinrich Walter in Hohenheim. From 1962 to 1966 he was curator and deputy director of the Westphalian Museum of Natural History in Münster, where he was responsible for nature conservation and landscape management in Westphalia. From 1961 to 1971 he was also president of the German Orchid Society and edited its journal Die Orchidee.

In 1966 he became professor at the Technical University of Munich at its Weihenstephan campus in Freising, where he led the newly founded institute for landscape management, later renamed the chair of landscape ecology. His work covered fundamental questions of ecology and its application in land use, nature conservation, agriculture and land consolidation, the planning and management of nature reserves and national parks, ecosystem research and modelling, and ecologically oriented planning. He held the chair until his retirement in 1993 and remained active there long afterwards.

Haber shaped German environmental policy for decades. From 1972 to 1994 he sat on the advisory board for nature conservation and landscape management at the federal agriculture ministry and later the environment ministry, and on a similar board in Bavaria. He took a leading role in the development of biotope mapping and in the creation of the first German national parks, the Bavarian Forest and Berchtesgaden. He was a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) from the early 1980s and its chairman from 1985, and was later speaker of the German Council for Land Stewardship.

In 1970 he co-founded the Gesellschaft für Ökologie, the association of ecologists in German-speaking countries, and later served as its president. From 1990 he was president of the International Association of Ecology (Intecol). After reunification he advised universities and research institutes in eastern Germany on a voluntary basis. In his 2010 book Die unbequemen Wahrheiten der Ökologie (The Inconvenient Truths of Ecology) he argued that a sustainable future depended on facing the finite nature of resources and rapid population growth rather than on idealised images of nature.

Haber was a keen orchid specialist, leading the German Orchid Society for a decade. He continued to supervise doctoral and diploma students well after his retirement, and into old age he kept up his links with the German Federal Environmental Foundation and attended its environmental prize ceremonies in person. He celebrated his 100th birthday on 13 September 2025. Little else about his private life has been reported publicly.

Wolfgang Haber died on 13 August 2026 at the age of 100, a month before his 101st birthday. He died in Untergartelshausen, part of the town of Freising in Bavaria. The cause of death was not made public.

The German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) announced his death on 14 August 2026. Its secretary general, Alexander Bonde, said Haber had been one of the fathers of landscape ecology and that his commitment to the environment, landscape and sustainability had inspired generations.

Haber is regarded as one of the founders of landscape ecology in Germany. Biotope mapping, which he helped develop, became a standard method in nature conservation, and the DBU credited his efforts more than 50 years earlier with the creation of Germany's first national parks. In 1993 he was one of the two first recipients of the German Environmental Prize, alongside the company Foron Hausgeräte. His other honours included the Bavarian Order of Merit (1973), the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1986), the Justus von Liebig Prize (1988), the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art (1993), an honorary doctorate from the University of Hohenheim (1989) and the Reinhold Tüxen Prize (2024).